Enough with Employees, We need More Employers
By siliconindia   |    4 Comments
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Enough with Employees, We need More Employers
In India, if 18 or 21 year old students or graduates tell their parents, relatives, teachers or anyone around them, that they have a great business idea and would like to start working on it, they would be laughed at and their idea will be dismissed as a joke. They will have more chance at convincing their elders that the earth revolves around the moon; than that they can build a successful company. Mark Zuckerberg was barely 20 when he started facebook; had people around him dismissed his idea as a youngster's stupidity, we would still be sending emails and SMS to our friends. Forget about Facebook, Paul Allen was 22 and Bill Gates 20, when they started Microsoft. Think of all the good things we would have missed if they were stopped. Why are we still producing only employees and not employers? There are several reasons for this. Our society seems to dawdle with the idea that business is passed on in genes and only a businessman's offspring would possess the ability to start and run a successful business. Our educational structure is more interested in theory than the practical approach; our middle class and upper middle classes mostly stay away from businesses. Our society thinks that youngsters don't have enough real life experience, to make the right choice; and above all, we have failed to accept failure. The truth is that, the society itself is restricting the number of innovators and genius business men it could have produced. It is said that a child is born agnostic. Our society instills all of its traits and characters into them, and along with these traits, is the idea that business is not for us. Parents and elders seem to have pledged to make their child an engineer or a doctor and show zero interest in what their child really cares about, or wants to be. The bollywood movie '3 Idiots' brilliantly portrayed this aspect of the Indian society; we seem to have come to the conclusion that the purpose of life, is to take lesser risks and choose a path that offers an assured job and a lot of money. Interest and aptitude seem to have taken a back seat in the society; and in such a society there is no room for a Zuckerberg, or a Gates, or a Jobs. An education structure, which is crafted according to the attitude of our society, cares little about anything, other than theory. The structure enables the students to get good grades and marks. But most of the students who graduate from Indian universities, have little or no real world practical knowledge. Companies are put in a difficult position when they hire these grads, as they will have to give them extensive training, to make them efficient. Nowadays, the companies also seem to have come into terms with this reality; we are literally manufacturing engineers, when what we could use more are scientists. Like in the U.S. or the UK, we need to weave in entrepreneurship to the very fabric of our society, so that the future generation will have the mentality to try something new and create a difference in this world. This can only be done through a total restructuring of education; our education needs to have more real world projects and assignment that would help students gain a practical perspective of businesses. We should move ahead from providing services and should concentrate more on research; then we will see more and more employers popping up in the country. Parents in the country have to realize that they are training their child to be a part of someone else's workforce, rather than becoming someone who employees the workforce. This idea of not thinking beyond working for someone else might have its root in our long history of being ruled by foreign powers, but that time has passed and we need to move ahead. A good majority of the people who made it big in this world, started trotting on that path early on; your motto should be, 'let them be all they can be.' "It ain't about how hard you hit, it's about how you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward," a famous quote from Sylvester Stallone's 2006 movie 'Rocky Balboa', captures the essence of winning completely. It is always about accepting failure, recovering from it and moving forward. Winston Churchill once said, "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." Recently in NASSCOM Product Conclave, Vinod Khosla said that "I don't mind failing, but when I succeed it better be worth succeeding." It is attitude like this that needed to be instilled in the youngsters and not a fear of failure. We need to learn to accept failure and move forward.

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